PENSION PAYBACK: While the huge sums of money being injected into super PACs and other outside spending groups — and the way it has been spent, largely on attack ads — have dominated the media’s coverage of this first post-Citizens United presidential election, one of the key concerns of many critics has seemed to fall flat, at least in the public eye. Corporations, or at the very least publicly-traded corporations with strong brand names familiar to consumers (and voters), have not been seen pumping money into outside spending groups.

There are of course exceptions, but conventional wisdom has held that companies with strong consumer brand names wouldn’t want to risk its reputation by getting involved with partisan politics.

But that facade began to crumble earlier this year when insurance giant Aetna accidentally disclosed to insurance regulators that it had given $3 million to American Action Network. American Action Network is a 501(c)(4) that OpenSecrets.org qualifies as a “shadow money” group because it doesn’t have to disclose its donors, and Aetna probably would’ve escaped scrutiny about its donation if it hadn’t disclosed the information (the company later amended its filing to regulators, omitting the donation to AAN.) The insurance company has referred to the donations as money for “voter education initiatives.”

And now, investors are demanding answers.

An investor group sent a letter to Aetna on Aug. 12, demanding more answers about the $3 million in donation, and a second $4 million contribution to the Chamber of Commerce — an amount that far exceeds any dues the company might have owed. Both the Chamber and American Action Network have been vocal opponents to President Barack Obama‘s healthcare reform. This investor group isn’t a rogue group of shareholders either — it’s composed of the kind of investors that make a company’s board of directors pay attention: institutional investors, like pension funds, and investment banks. Specifically, the group is composed of a number of very large union and state employee pension funds, and mostly European investment banks, but they have a combined $922 billion in holdings and more than 1.6 million shares in Aetna alone.

“Aetna’s effort to characterize millions in political donations it made in 2011 as ‘educational’ activities is a red flag for shareholders,” New York state Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli said in a statement.

Although the groups involved certainly have a partisan spin, for now, they’re basing their complaints on economic value.

“Regardless of whether the expenditures were for lobbying or for education purposes, we still don’t know what the $7 million bought the company or its investors,” said UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust chairman Robert Naftaly. Perhaps most intriguingly, according to Bloomberg, the letter the investors sent was also sent to 19 other companies — but for now, the group is keeping quiet about which ones.

UNIONS VS SUPER-PACS?: Today’s New York Timescites OpenSecrets.org data in a dissection of the battle of allies shaping up in Ohio this year — Democratically-allied unions versus outside spending groups allied with Republicans. The article notes that, according to our data, in 2008, corporate PACs and individuals employed by affiliated corporations spent about $2 billion, while union-affiliated PACs spent just $75 million.

Of course, not every union member’s donations are recorded by the FEC as a union-affiliated donation — when individuals make political donations of more than $200, they are required to supply their employer info, but not necessarily their union affiliation. Similarly, not every individual who works for a corporation makes a donation that favors the interests of their employer — in fact, many of them might be union members.

A representative for Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group battling against unions in Ohio, told the Times that he was skeptical of claims by union reps that organized labor was going to be outgunned by conservative groups this year.

“Maybe that’s the case, but it also sounds an awful lot to me like they’re trying to manage expectations,” he said to the Times.

Perhaps, but it’s difficult to even set expectations for groups like Americans for Prosperity. It isn’t even a super PAC. The group is actually a 501(c)(4) organization — it doesn’t disclose its donors, so we really have no idea how much money they have to spend. We do know that they’ve spent $24.8 million on independent expenditures against President Obama — ads that explicitly advocate for voters to vote against him — but that’s a drop in the bucket. As a group that operates outside the purview of the Federal Election Commission, AFP isn’t required to disclose anything but its spending on those independent expenditures.

As the Times article shows, AFP is busily working in Ohio, claiming to have contacted over 1 million voters — spending that kind of work, and any “issue ads” the group has run to this point, won’t be recorded publicly.

Russ joined the Center in March 2012 as the money-in-politics reporter. His duties include reporting for OpenSecrets Blog and assisting with press inquiries. Russ has a background in investigative journalism, having worked as a reporter for the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, and he spent five years as a newspaper reporter in New Hampshire. He has a degree in political science from Muhlenberg College and a M.A. in journalism and public affairs from American University.

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